Entries from September 2003

So Bhisma has requested a few long posts on the cognitive neuroscience conference I’m currently attending in Oxford (that’s my life – one long, endless round of conferences…). The conference, properly named the Autumn School in Cognitive Neuroscience, began on Monday at the Department of Experimental Psychology. Some thoughts on the sessions:
First talk was by [...]

Metafilter UK Oxford meetup photos – a highly geeky and highly successful meetup of Metafilter UK members, featuring drinks, noodles, more drinks, a run-in with the police, a gig in a dive bar, yet more drinks and ice cream. I had a lot of fun and met a bunch of very interesting people; hopefully another [...]

Planet Autism – a moving article at Salon on the realities of living with an autistic child; it’s not all Rain Man. The related MetaFilter thread has a comment from a parent about his experience with his autistic son.

Doctor Who will finally be back on TV in two years time. I was never a big fan of Doctor Who, but I do think that the BBC could do a good job in developing an SF show now, and it would be fun to see some British SF as well.
The reason why this announcement [...]

FeedDemon is a great RSS reader for Windows, possibly the best. It’s streamlined my reading habits and speeded things tremendously. It’s not perfect, still being in the beta stage, but that does mean that it’s still free. Normally I use Newzcrawler but it managed to trash my subscriptions while upgrading to 1.5; plus it was [...]

Cheap Friends DVDs at Play.com – Seasons 1 to 4 are selling for only �18 each, which isn’t bad at all. I’m inclined to buy Seasons 1 and 2, after which the show broke my heart by making all the characters intensely irritating. Also, Virgin are running a ‘Mega Sale’ promotion at the moment on [...]

GameCube dev kits for UK universities – the story isn’t that interesting in itself, but the spin is great. Nintendo have just given four ‘leading UK universities’ GameCube development kits. Who are these universities, you might wonder? Are they Oxford or Cambridge, or Imperial or UMIST or Warwick or some red-brick institution? No.
They are the [...]

Several months ago, I read about a project at Media Lab Europe that showed a lot of promise (I was shocked as anyone else) – Amble Time. Amble Time basically factors time into geographical maps, telling you where you could walk in a certain amount of time.
By using a GPS system and your average walking [...]

I try to make a point of just reading, not posting to, Star Trek messageboards; there’s some fun stuff that gets said there but I just don’t feel like I have the time or patience to get involved.
However, after I watched the latest Enterprise episode (Anomaly) – which was unusually entertaining and well done, I [...]

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What are the 100 objects that future historians will pick to define our 21st century? A javelin thrown by an 'enhanced' Paralympian, far further than any normal human? Virtual reality interrogation equipment used by police forces? The world's most expensive glass of water, mined from the moons of Mars? Or desire modification drugs that fuel a brand new religion?

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